Iran's nukes are no joke

There are some things about which I can take pleasure in saying, “I told you so,” but a nuclear Iran is not one of them.

I first wrote about the slow but steady progress of Iran toward becoming a nuclear power in December 2007, and then followed up in 2010. The theme of both columns was the incredible naivete of the United States in accepting the reassuring words coming from Tehran about the Islamic republic’s nuclear intentions.

In 2007, I disdainfully concluded, “if global geopolitics were a television sitcom, then the government of the United States would be Boss Hogg, and Mahmoud and the gang in Tehran would be the Dukes of Hazzard. We may have more money and power, but them Duke boys always seem to get the last laugh.”

That was just after the American intelligence agencies issued their National Intelligence Estimate judging “with high confidence” that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and the national media started celebrating our good luck in not having to go to war with yet another Mideastern country.

But as I pointed out after reading the public summary of the NIE, even though the United States officially accepted the story that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, they also acknowledged that Iran was continuing to enrich uranium and would be able to develop a nuclear weapon sometime between 2010 and 2015. Maybe we should have stopped celebrating how smart we were and taken a good hard look at a calendar!

Well, here we are in early 2014, and according to Olli Heinonen, former deputy director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, if Iran decides to abrogate the latest deal reached with the U.S. and other major powers, “it would take about two, three weeks to have enough uranium hexafluoride high-enriched for one single weapon.”

Yippee! That’s some fine negotiating.

This is all completely distorted by politics and gamesmanship both in D.C. and Tehran, but it doesn’t take a diplomatic genius to know that we have been taken advantage of both by the Iranians and by forces in the United States who don’t really think it is any business of ours to prevent Iran from going nuclear.

The only question really is when the American people will wake up from their slumber and demand accountability. I thought it would happen in February 2010 when the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency issued its own report and warned that Iran might indeed be working on building a nuclear warhead. You think? Heck, the UN report even revealed that U.S. intelligence in 2005 had obtained an Iranian laptop computer filled with evidence that “Tehran had been working on details of nuclear weapons, including missile trajectories and ideal altitudes for exploding nuclear warheads.”

That damning evidence was acquired fully two years before the famous NIE report came out saying we have nothing to fear from Iran but fear itself. But of course the revelations in 2010 that we had been conned in 2007 only elicited a big yawn from the American public.

Today, it’s more of the same as the United States tries to sell the great accomplishment of getting Tehran to sign a six-month nuclear deal, while Iran points out proudly that it “did not agree to dismantle anything.” The Iranians certainly did not agree to destroy any centrifuges, and on Friday, David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, told the Associated Press that “Iran must remove some 15,000 of its estimated 20,000 centrifuges to make a final agreement palatable for the United States.”

What is the chance of that happening?

No wonder experts are starting to say that Iran is simply stalling for time in order to reap the benefit of billions of dollars pouring into its reeling economy while longtime sanctions are eased.

It’s not hard to see how Iran benefits from the patched-together nuclear deal. The real question is how does the United States benefit — and the only answer I can come up with is that our “statesmen” are stalling for time, too — because they don’t know what else to do.

And once Iran inevitably joins North Korea and Pakistan as a nuclear power, it will be too late to do anything. The “Axis of Evil” that President Bush talked about in 2002 will not just be a political slogan, but a fact of life that will ultimately unleash the havoc that evil always spawns. At that point, American naivete will not be a joke any longer, but a historical error that will rival the willfully blind optimism of another “statesman” — Neville Chamberlain — before World War II.

A price will be paid. Mark my words.